Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty November 20, 2013 Off to Boston; Hope to See You Tonight! Get Used to This Headline: 'Obama Approval Hits Record Low' Breaking this morning: the Obama presidency. Also, a new poll: President Obama's job approval rating has plunged to the lowest of his presidency, according to a new CBS News poll released Wednesday, and Americans' approval of the Affordable Care Act has dropped it's lowest since CBS News started polling on the law. Thirty-seven percent now approve of the job Mr. Obama is doing as president, down from 46 percent in October -- a nine point drop in just a month. Mr. Obama's disapproval rating is 57 percent -- the highest level for this president in CBS News Polls. Republicans are nearly unanimous in their disapproval of the law, and now more than two-thirds of independents agree. Almost six in ten Democrats continue to support the law, but their support has dropped 16 points from last month -- from 74 percent in October to 58 percent today. More than a month after the health care exchanges opened, just one in 10 Americans think the sign-up for the exchanges has been going well. Instead, more than two-thirds think it's not going well -- including seven in 10 of those who have looked up information on the exchanges themselves. And just a third of Americans are confident that the federal government's healthcare website -- HealthCare.gov -- will be fixed by the December 1st deadline set by the Obama administration. That one-third of Americans also believed it when they were told the word 'gullible' is not in the dictionary. On a related note: "The 30th of November is not a magic go, no-go date. It is a work of constant improvement," Sebelius told the Associated Press Tuesday. "We have some very specific things we know we need to complete by the 30th and that punch list is getting knocked out every week." An Optimistic Vision of Our Near Future "We are going to have to obviously remarket and rebrand [Obamacare], and that will be challenging in this political environment." -- President Obama, speaking about Obamacare, at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Summit yesterday. Obama may or may not be stupid, but he sure as heck has a blind spot when it comes to evaluating problems. The problem with Obamacare is not the program's branding. The problem with Obamacare is Obamacare -- how it's structured, what it requires Americans to do, what it requires insurers to do, the false promises used to sell it, and most important, the administration's utter inability to do any of the basic tasks that it promised -- like have the payment system built, never mind up and running, six weeks after the exchanges launch: A crucial system for making payments to insurers from the federal Obamacare marketplace, HealthCare.gov, has yet to be built, a senior government IT official admitted Tuesday. The official, Henry Chao, visibly stunned Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) when he said under questioning that a significant fraction of that online insurance marketplace has yet to be constructed. "We still need to build the payments system to make the payments [to insurance companies] in January," Chao said during testimony. That so-called financial management tool was originally supposed to be part of HealthCare.gov when it launched Oct. 1, but officials later suspended its launch as part of their effort to get the consumer interface part of the site ready. Chao on Tuesday said other areas that need to be built include "the back-office systems, the accounting systems." "This means that insurers, who are already dealing with dramatically lower enrollment numbers on HealthCare.gov than they were expecting, are not going to get paid while the government gets its act together, and the software in place to makes those payments happen," CNBC's Dan Mangan explains. "That's like setting up an online bank without setting up a way to make deposits," an industry source told CNBC. A cynic would argue Obama's obsessed with the "branding" because that's the only part he really understands. We know he has conditioned his staff to avoid telling him bad news -- doesn't need the drama. He's telling us now that the process of buying insurance is more complicated than he and his team thought, raising the question of how well they understood the entire issue throughout this process. He's clearly not interested in digging into the details of the problem; he told us that even a week after the troubled launch, he believed it was just routine "glitches." The fact that we're learning this from Chao, now, suggests that the situation is still basically the same now as it was October 1: No one in the White House really knows the status of Healthcare.gov and its repairs and implementation. They're flying blind, making optimistic promises and hoping for the best. The audacity of hope, you might say. Allow me to lay out a scenario that some will find excessively optimistic, and some will find excessively pessimistic. Everyone in America is now required to buy health insurance or pay a fine equal to one percent of their income, and that process they're supposed to use to shop for and buy insurance doesn't have a billing system. The cries to delay the individual mandate will grow deafening, but Obama will insist on full-speed-ahead. Next year, those who have had their plans canceled will be angry, those who are paying higher premiums will be angry, those who are paying the fine will be angry, the insurers sure as heck will be angry, and those who did manage to buy through the site will be angry once they see their premiums, copays, and deductibles. And then, in fall 2014, the employer mandate kicks in, and an as-yet-unknown percentage of employers decide that it's cheaper to pay the penalty than pay the cost of insurance for their employees. Millions more Americans are suddenly informed that their plans are canceled. Meanwhile, premiums for 2015 are higher, because insurers are dealing with the consequences of the older, sicker pool of workers who signed up in 2014. Obama and his team will keep insisting that the health-care system is improving, contradicting the personal experience of millions of Americans. The 2014 midterms turn into a bloodbath for Democrats. Obama spends the final two years of his presidency vetoing efforts to repeal the whole damn thing. Here's where I really turn into an optimist: The catastrophic failure of Obamacare will cause Americans to drastically reevaluate President Obama himself, and the criteria they used to evaluate him as a potential president in 2008 and 2012. Maybe charisma, nice speeches, a beautiful family, and perfect pant creases aren't enough. You're not supposed to go from being an obscure state senator to president of the United States in a four-year span. The next president can't get the job based upon potential. We need a proven problem-solver. In the coming years, a solid majority of Americans outside of committed liberals will begin to acknowledge the hard truth that Barack Obama has been a failure as a president. It isn't merely that his signature reform was sold with lies and managed to exacerbate the problems of the health-care system instead of solving them. What else will be Obama's legacy? This terrific economy we're enjoying? The out-of-control domestic-surveillance programs at the NSA? Partisan abuses of the IRS? The national debt more than doubling under Obama's presidency? The partisan fury in Washington? Eight years of ignoring the ticking time bomb of entitlements as the Baby Boomers begin to retire? This isn't even touching on foreign policy. Yes, President Obama authorized the bin Laden mission and got U.S. troops out of Iraq, but the Middle East is a bloody mess, Israel feels besieged and abandoned, our allies are alienated by our NSA activities, we're spent enormous amounts of blood and treasure in Afghanistan for inconclusive results, Russia is on the march, and we appear to be desperately trying to get a deal with the Iranians that the French think will allow Tehran to pursue a nuclear program. He has no warm relationships with any other world leader. We on the right argued that America made the wrong call in 2008. Barack Obama is naïve in his view of the world. He did not and does not understand what causes businesses to hire people. He has way too much faith in government spending's ability to create jobs, and is ultimately comfortable with the practices of crony capitalism. He never foresees the failures of the federal bureaucracy and rarely is upset about them for long. Scandals like Fast & Furious, the IRS abuses, and Benghazi percolate under him and congressional demands for accountability are dismissed as partisan witch hunts. His cabinet is a collection of egomaniacs and tired pols who are incapable of instituting a culture of responsibility for taxpayer dollars. He is ultimately incurious about the world and has resisted reevaluating his approaches. He wings it at the worst times, instituting 'red lines', then hastily retreats from his commitments. The Obamacare Site Is Like Beirut for Your Social-Security Number A very close second in the competition for 'Worst News for Obamacare of Tuesday':
President Barack Obama's HealthCare.gov site is riddled with security flaws that put user data of millions of people at risk and it should be shut down until fixed, several technology experts warned lawmakers on Tuesday. The testimony at a congressional hearing could increase concerns among many Americans about Obama's healthcare overhaul, popularly known as Obamacare. Opinion polls show the botched rollout of the online marketplace for health insurance policies has hurt the popularity of the effort.
The website collects personal data such as names, birth dates, social security numbers, email addresses and other information that criminals could use for a variety of scams. In a rapid "yes" or "no" question-and-answer session during a Republican-sponsored hearing by the House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology Committee, Republican Representative Chris Collins of New York asked four experts about the security of the site: "Do any of you think today that the site is secure?" The answer from the experts, which included two academics and two private sector technical researchers, was a unanimous "no." One reason the Obamacare site is in such trouble is that what's left is not the easy stuff; what's left is the hard stuff. Our friend Bruce Webster reminds us of something he wrote about IT projects a while back that is extremely relevant today: There is a very natural, very human tendency to concentrate on the easiest tasks, the "low-hanging fruit" that can be readily implemented and checked off… In turn, this makes it possible for you to demonstrate the [user interfaces] to upper management and show what great progress is being made. Of course, this can get you into trouble, since upper management may think you're a lot farther along than you actually are. Even worse, you may think you're a lot farther along than you actually are… Let's say you have a hard problem X to solve in subsystem A; you also have a hard problem Y to solve in subsystem B. After brilliant work and brainstorming, you have come up with solutions to X and Y. The problem: the two solutions are mutually incompatible. In other words, the solution to X precludes the solution to Y, and vice versa. This may seem unlikely, but I have seen it any number of times, particularly where problem X is a functionality problem requiring intense data retrieval and processing, while problem Y is a performance problem requiring a much quicker response time or heavier load processing than the system can currently handle. Now imagine that you have a dozen or so different "hard problems" to solve — with any number of interdependencies and exclusions — and you can begin to understand why so many IT projects get to the 80 percent to 90 percent "completed" stage and then get stuck there for months. Morning Joe Speaks to the Morning Jolt! I had a chance to speak with Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC's Morning Joe, recently, about his new book, The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics -- And Can Again. I'll share more of Scarborough's policy prescriptions later this week, but I thought I'd begin by asking Scarborough about what his pitch is to those who dismiss him as a RINO. Jim: As you no doubt are aware, in the world of Twitter and in comment sections of websites, there are some folks who are a wee bit skeptical of your assessment of the Republican party. So I wanted to give you a chance to give your elevator pitch, your short pitch, to someone who's skeptical of the criticisms you made of Republicans recently, and why should they listen to you and why the ideas you're articulating would move the party in a better direction. Scarborough: (laughing) Yeah, why should they listen to me? Why in the world would anyone in the Republican party listen to me? Because they have absolutely no idea how to win elections! You know, I was only the first Republican to get elected in my [House] district since 1873. I started out a campaign against a 16-year incumbent. Everybody said I was going to lose. Newt Gingrich said I was too conservative for my own district. He and the entire Washington establishment threw all of their weight and power and K Street behind my moderate pro-choice opponent. And I ended up winning the election with 62 percent of the vote. And how did I do it? I ran as a conservative, pro-life, pro-gun Republican. I wasn't extreme on any of the issues. I talked about economics. I talked about tax reform. I talked about getting rid of the income tax and reforming the tax code, going to a tax system that actually encouraged hard work and economic development. I'd get a lot of people coming up to me saying that they disagreed with me on a lot of issues, that I was more conservative than they were, but they liked me and they voted for me because they knew I was going to go to Washington and I was going to fight for them. You can trace a straight line from what I said on the campaign trail in 1994 in northwest Florida, to what I have said throughout my congressional career, what I voted in thousands and thousands of congressional votes, what I said on 'Scarborough Country' every night -- in 2003, I started warning about George W. Bush's big government spending ways -- in early 2003, everybody else was turning a blind eye to it. In 2004, I wrote a book, Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day. I predicted that big-government Republicanism was going to lead to the destruction of the GOP majority and wreck the economy. The only people who were talking that way in 2004 were Tom Coburn, myself, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. In 2009, I wrote another book, where I said the same exact things I said years back. Over the past several years, I've been branded this RINO, for basically calling the people that our party keeps putting up for elections 'amateurs.' I was right when I criticized Mitt Romney, and I was attacked for being a RINO. I was right when I kept saying to people like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain and Rick Perry and a lot of these other contenders that were getting a lot of national media attention, I said they're amateurs, they're not going to be able to win a national general election. I said time and time again, on air, that this happens to us every four years, where we get amateurs. They run on the extreme right. I don't just mean ideologically, I mean temperamentally, in a way that offends voters in all the swing areas we need to win, whether it's the suburbs of Philly, the I-4 corridor [in Florida] -- areas Republicans need to win in order to win national elections.
(getting excited) In spite of all these predictions that always turn out to be right, I'm somehow a RINO because I'm being the Cassandra here, who has been saying the same . . . exact . . . thing! I almost swore! There is one issue where people can say, 'Joe Scarborough has changed,' and they would be right. That has to do with guns, specifically background checks. I support background checks, that puts me with 90 percent of Americans, that puts me with Ronald Reagan. If that one issue alone that I've changed on, since 1994, if that makes me a RINO, and these people say I don't fit in the party, I think they're sadly mistaken. It's always been my party, it is my party, and it's going to be my party. I believe in small-government conservatism and that's what drives me every day. ADDENDUM: From Gallup: 
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